Miss Hope Springs is a glamorous creation with a huge Dusty Springfield beehive, a sharp-witted delivery and a core of loyal fans that not even last night’s hurricane warnings could keep away. How they whooped as she sashayed across to the piano, pausing abruptly to grip her lower back in a mock spasm of pain.
“I thought I’d start with a number by my very close personal friend, Barbra Streisand,” she said, “but then I thought ‘no, she never does any of mine’.”
The advertised theme was Space, with ditties such as Your Love is Out of This World, but the gloves came off later with grown-up offerings such as I’m Bi (There’s nothing I Won’t Try), dedicated to Tallulah Bankhead, the early movie star who complained: “My father warned me about men and alcohol but never about women and cocaine.”
Hope reminisced about coming from a long line of singers — “including my mother, Rusty Springs, my grandmother, Connie Linctus, and my American great-grandmother, Augusta Wind.”
In fact, she started out as male model Ty Jeffries, son of late film actor and national treasure Lionel Jeffries, whose comic timing clearly runs in the family.
But as an expert singer-pianist and writer of such deep songs as Love Flows Like a River (It Knows the Way), her talent is a solid foil for those salty gags about everyone from Liberace to Captain Kirk. An amusing show and musically literate, just as all good cabaret should be.
Every Sunday. 020 7734 4888. The London Festival of Cabaret runs until November 17, londonfestivalofcabaret.com
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